Rossi’s Famous 10 doesn’t fiddle around. It has carving on its mind, and doesn’t care who knows it. Set it up to turn and it’s going to deliver; as fast as you can tip it side to side, it’s ready to etch miniature parentheses in the snow. Unlike All-Mountain skis, whose dreams consist of endless prairies of powder, the Famous 10 maintains a laser focus on its métier, applying high edge angles to hard snow and letting its nervous-twitch-quick reflexes whip it in and out of simulated slalom turns.

True to its no-nonsense nature, the Famous 10 doesn’t pretend to care about what dragons lie off trail. It was bred to treat hard snow with disdain and all its other forms as if they didn’t exist at all.

Rebound has become, in the era of shaped skis, a relative anomaly; today’s skis use their sidecut to escort them through the bottom of a turn. Even more rare is a ski whose energy off the edge is its most distinctive feature, as is the case with the Famous 10. “You can feel the power burst out of the turn,” says a California Ski Company tester, who encapsulated the Famous 10’s profile as, “Frontside carver with a kick.”